


You Against the Sky

by pellucid



Category: Call the Midwife
Genre: F/M, Married Sex, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-22
Updated: 2017-05-22
Packaged: 2018-11-03 12:26:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10967217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pellucid/pseuds/pellucid
Summary: When she shopped for the journey in London, she hadn’t understood the heat. Nor, it turns out, had she properly understood synthetic fabrics.





	You Against the Sky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gabolange](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gabolange/gifts).



> for gabolange, who deserves all the Turner smut in the world (and everything else besides), on the belated anniversary of her birth. And with additional thanks to her for betaing her own gift after it was a month late. <3

Nothing had prepared Shelagh for the South African heat. Even the warmest summer days London could conjure were nothing compared to this unrelenting sun and the oppressive humidity. In the stillness, the air is thick, and with the wind comes the dust, finding its way everywhere.

Tonight, at least, there is a pleasant breeze coming through the windows of their room. It isn’t as cool as she’d like, but it moves the air and dissipates the humidity a bit. She sits in bed, atop the bedclothes, trying to read; every time a new gust of air comes through, she closes her eyes and enjoys it.

When she shopped for the journey in London, she hadn’t understood the heat. Nor, it turns out, had she properly understood synthetic fabrics. The nightdress she’d been so proud of doesn’t breathe. It clings to her skin and makes her sticky and uncomfortable. She reaches down to pluck it away from her chest as a bead of sweat runs down between her breasts.

“Ugh,” she complains, just in time for Patrick to come in from the washroom.

“What’s wrong?” he asks. He had shed his pajama top by day two, but Shelagh suspects the cotton pajama bottoms are still keeping him cooler than her thin gown is keeping her.

“This nightdress. It’s almost worse with the breeze coming in; it just reminds me that I can’t get entirely cool.”

Patrick looks thoughtful, and then intent, as he sits on the bed beside her. He reaches out to examine the hem of her nightdress, then, slowly, inches it up her thighs. “You can’t get cool while you’re wearing it, you mean.” 

She knows that tone of voice all too well, and it makes her smile in spite of herself. His index finger traces the neckline of the dress, tugging it down. Shelagh swallows and bites her bottom lip.

“Patrick, if we do that, we have to close the shutters, and we lose the breeze.”

He meets her eyes. “Do we?”

The breeze teases the parts of her skin he had uncovered. Shelagh closes her eyes. They are in a communal space, their colleagues and the other residents and patients at the clinic coming and going outside the building. “Someone could see in,” she argues, though she can hear herself starting to acquiesce. The idea of the breeze on her skin is compelling; a gentle gust comes through the window at that moment, and a sharp wave of arousal catches her breath. 

Patrick’s fingers continue to play along the edge of the fabric at her neck, his thumb reaching down to stroke the swell of her breast. “I’m sure they can’t,” he says, his voice low and full of plans. “It’s dark out. We’ll put out the candles in here. It’s the second story, facing away from the porch. Someone would practically have to climb the outside wall and stick their head in the window. We have all the privacy we need.” To make his point, he leans over to blow out the candle on the table by his side of the bed.

Shelagh watches him for a long moment. The dim light cast shadows across his face and exaggerates the stubble on his cheeks. Her beautiful, careworn husband, looking at her with desire, determination, and a hint of mischief. Of course she wants to be cool, and out of this nightdress, and she wants his hands to stop just teasing along the top of her breast and actually touch her. He knows all of that—knows her so well in every way—which she finds wonderful, still a little startling, and ever so slightly exasperating. “Very well, then,” she says, smiling as she kisses him.

Patrick makes quick work of the candles, and soon the room is almost entirely dark. She sets her book and glasses on the bedside table and hears, rather than sees, him come back to bed.

She tries to reach for him, fumbling a little in the darkness, but moving toward him nonetheless, in this familiar dance of theirs. “Hmm,” he says, stilling her hands. “I thought you wanted to get cool.” 

She hears the smile in his voice, the tone that tells her he has ideas about how he wants this to go, and her heart speeds up a little in anticipation. “How do you want me?” she asks, a little disappointed that she can’t watch the way his eyes dilate in response. 

He makes a noise that is half chuckle, half groan, and she knows she hit her mark. “Undressed.” He doesn’t hesitate. “And then lie back.”

He tugs the nightdress over her head in one move, then shucks off his own pajama bottoms. As Shelagh moves back against the pillows, she raises her hips and slips off her knickers. 

To be naked like this, exposed to the night air, is an entirely new sensation. The breeze plays across her skin, causing her nipples to pebble and gooseflesh to rise across her body. She’s hot and cool at once, the physical sensations of the warm air and the breeze combining with the familiar heat pooling between her legs and the delicious shiver of arousal. A gust comes in the window, and the stab of desire that comes with it leaves her breathless. “Patrick,” she murmurs, because even without touching her, he is so present, watching her in the darkness.

“Better?” he asks, and if she can’t entirely see the smile on his face, she can certainly imagine it.

“Much,” she replies, though she isn’t sure what she wants next. She wants him closer, wants his hands on her, yet she is loathe for anything—especially not more body heat—to disrupt this glorious breeze. 

When he touches her a moment later, it is with a single finger, tracing her jaw, her throat, her clavicle. “Mm,” she sighs, as his finger draws lazy circles on one breast, and then the other. Her body is cooler now, and his fingertip burns, arousing everything it touches—her sternum, her belly, the hollow of her hip. He traces a line up her inner thigh, and she opens her legs to the breeze and to him. 

He doesn’t stay there, though, and his fingertip, now joined by two others, skim back up her ribs and stroke the outside curve of her breast. She bites her bottom lip and arches her back, pushing her breast into his fingers. Patrick laughs softly. “Patience,” he says, as he rolls her nipple between thumb and forefinger, and Shelagh gasps, her hips bucking involuntarily. Even years into their marriage, she always feels a little wanton laid out for him like this, and imagining herself through his eyes sets every nerve in her body aflame. 

She reaches out for him in the dark, craving more contact, her hand finding his hair, his forehead. He leans into her hand, his mouth, then tongue, finding the pulse point of her wrist. Her fingers clench in his hair as his fingers slide, feather light, across her hip.

It seems astonishing that they are scarcely touching, can barely see one another, yet she is entirely aroused here in this cocoon of darkness and quiet and night air. Usually he can’t stop touching her. Theirs is a communion of hands, mouths, skin; they’ve memorized every taste and touch of each other. She loves his skin on hers, but this delicious tension of not touching, the heat of him so close yet not close enough, is making her desperate. 

Finally Patrick moves toward her, his mouth tracing a line up her arm to her clavicle. His tongue burns hot, and then he blows the wet skin cool, first her neck, then her breasts. She can’t stop the moan that escapes as his teeth scrape her nipple and his fingertips dance lightly on her ribs. He loves her breasts, and she loves his hands and mouth on them, but by now she is taut and ready from this heady atmosphere and his slow teasing.

She finds a shoulder with her hands and hooks a leg around his hip, pulling her to him. “Touch me, Patrick,” she says, her voice more breathy and desperate than she expects. She can feel his grin against her belly.

“I thought you were too warm for body heat,” he teases, and he’s right, of course. His body against hers is like a furnace, but she wants him that way anyway, at least for a moment, skin against skin as he slides down between her legs, his hands finally spreading fully across her abdomen, up her thighs.

He slips two fingers into her, and his thumb finds a rhythm against her clitoris, first slow, then faster, rougher. His mouth lingers on the sensitive skin of her inner thigh before replacing his thumb. “Oh,” she cries, because somehow, even after almost three years and countless times doing this, the aching sensation of _want_ always surprises her. 

She’s very close now, and for a long moment as her desire builds she feels like she’s gone out of her body entirely, floating in the darkness and the breeze. Patrick anchors her with his mouth, his hands. She threads her fingers into his hair, holding him to her, and she runs her other hand across her body, grounding herself to this moment, this room, this man. Patrick sucks harder at the same moment she kneads her own breast. She comes so hard her cry catches noiselessly in her throat, and she’s flying, trembling, hips jerking against Patrick’s mouth. 

Patrick smiles against her thigh as she comes down, and she tugs lightly on his hair to bring him up to her, kissing him and tasting the sharp tang of her wetness on his lips and tongue. “Cooler now?” he asks, grinning, and she laughs. She is and she isn’t, but that hardly matters anymore.

“I think it’s your turn to lie back,” she says instead, pushing him down gently as she sits up. The air blows across her back, and she feels the beginnings of pleasure building anew. 

The room isn’t pitch black, but it’s dark enough, and without her glasses Shelagh is operating purely by touch. Her hands find Patrick’s arms and run across his shoulders, chest, and belly. “Shelagh,” he groans, as she traces the line of hair from his navel to his groin. The strangled noise that comes from his throat as she lightly grips his erection, running a thumb across the tip, is much less coherent. 

Thinking of how quickly she came apart with him scarcely touching her at all, she is tempted to take him just as fast, with her mouth and her hands. But she wants him inside her and knows, always knows, that he wants the same thing. “Mmm, darling,” he gasps as she lifts herself up to straddle him, settling down on him in a single move.

They meet each other in a gentle rhythm, and she finds his hand and tangles their fingers together. “My favorite view,” Patrick comments wryly. It is, she knows, but tonight, when they can’t see each other, it makes her laugh. 

Upright, she is even more exposed to the night air, and it is terribly arousing with the breeze coming through the open window, touching all of her bare skin. Every sensitive nerve is on fire as she shivers and throws back her head. Shelagh shifts her angle slightly and increases the rhythm, until just—there. “Oh,” she says, grasping Patrick’s hand harder with one hand and finding her breast again with the other. Though this is one of Patrick’s favorite positions, she usually can’t come this way, but now her breath starts to come faster, and she feels her muscles clench around him. 

She arches her back into a new gust of cool air as Patrick’s thrusts grow more forceful and erratic. He is nearly there, and she is there with him; with a sharp twist of her nipple, she sends herself over the edge. She is shuddering, gasping, boneless, as he manages one, two more thrusts before coming undone with a low cry.

She collapses down onto him, body heat be damned, needing this intimacy of skin on skin. She tucks her face into his neck as his arms come around her, his hands splaying across her back and buttocks to hold her to him. She smiles against his skin and flicks her tongue out to taste the salt of sweat at his pulse point.

“This won’t make you cooler,” he says, and she can hear the grin in his voice.

“I don’t care,” she replies, meaning it, holding him tighter.


End file.
